Leaf of the Day: Mexican Petunia and White Ibis

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Today I worked in the morning to get the drawing done and then in the afternoon went to the lake for a break. In the heat of the early afternoon there was not much bird activity, just one funny little ibis. It must be a young one as it was rather scruffy with mottled grey brown neck feathers and not yet completely terrified of humans, as it was quite happy to potter about on the shore line with me close by, allowing me to do a small sketch.

Usually the ibis operate in small gangs, marching across lawns at regimental speed stabbing their beaks into the grass and muttering as they go. They are very comical. However this one was alone and hung around long enough for a quick drawing. Normally they are band box smart with red bills and red legs and glossy white coats.

When I see them I am always reminded of some old applique tapestries we used to have, depicting Egyptian gods. Thoth the ibis-headed god was definitely one of them. The Sacred ibis of Egypt is different from this little American White ibis. It has a more sinister apperance with a featherless black head and neck. Thoth was the god of wisdom and writing I seem to remember that he was supposed to have won us 5 extra days in the year in a gambling game with the moon.

I am hoping to find the American lotus flower soon so I can compose a hybrid “amerigyptian” homage painting to this ancient culture.

Hybrids can pose problems of course. My drawing today is a dangerous cross border invader. The Mexican Petunia ( ruellia) is classed a Category I invasive species by the Florida Exotic Pest Plant Council. It is unwelcome for its tendency to “alter native plant communities by displacing native species, changing community structures or ecological functions, or hybridizing with natives”… just like the Brits on the Costa del Sol.
This innocent looking purple pink flower is seen in gardens and park borders all over Winter Park. Again it is a delicate flower that has to be drawn quickly before it shrivels up. I am now seeing the similarity in these one day wonders as they are from the same family, the acanthaceae, as was the Sky Flower.
Confusingly it is not the same family as the much loved hanging basket and window box petunia that we know in the UK. They are from the solanaceae family which include tobacco, potatoes,and tomaotoes.
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Mexican Petunia

Leaf of the Day: Loquat Fruit

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There are two loquat trees, eriobotrya japonica. (‘nispero’ in Spanish) growing locally here and I had not realised that the fruits were edible, because no one around here seems to collect them. But I do remember seeing dishes “with nisperos” on some menus in Spain. They are absolutely delicious.
Loquats and Kumquats are not related but share a similarity in their names because the Cantonese word kwêt, means an orange and both fruit are somewhat like small oranges. Peter Thunberg had seen Loquats in Japan in 1776 ( I wrote a little about this very interesting botanist here in the Sky Flower post) and plants were taken from Canton, China, to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, England, in 1787.

Here are two beautiful images of loquats to celebrate their Oriental origin.
This one, Loquat and Mountain Bird a Chinese silk painting, Chinese Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279)


This one a Japanese woodblock print, by Shodo Kawarazaki 1889-1973


Loquats taste something like a cross between an apricot, plum, and pineapple with a delicate flavor. They are used in cooking quite extensively and have a high pectin content so are often made into jams and jellies and preserves.
Prepare a delicious loquat sauce to pour over pan fried pork tenderloin with strawberries, loquats, and Madeira wine. Delicious!

Mine here do not look particularly appetising I know. It is a little bit past the best time for loquats but I wanted to draw these two just as they were, one split open and one whole.
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Loquat Fruit

Leaf of the Day: Ruskin & the Liberty of Leaves (and the Croton again).

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I do like leaves, probably more so than flowers. They are the sort of backroom boys of the plant world, working hard to keep the whole thing going and so often overlooked for the glory-taking showy flowers. And I have always liked drawing trees. This quote from the artist and critic John Ruskin encourages me to keep going.
“If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world. “
He, like me, didn’t like formula painting, but felt that “the artist must ultimately focus on the characteristic of individuals,” and must “show the individual character and liberty of the separate leaves, clouds, or rocks” Individuality being more essential than formula.
(It is something I mentioned before in the Norman Rockwell post re Bruegel’s beautiful trees.)
So, artists!.. liberate your leaves…

How many times I have seen a ” How to Do it Book ” with a formula for painting leaves so every tree looks the same. They are excellent guides for starting out and when I was young my Walter T Foster book on “How to draw Horses” was always with me, but we should aim to go on from there and really look at what we are attempting to portray. This morning Amazon kindly sent me an email telling me that because I had bought a book on botanical painting I would no doubt be keen to purchase a ” how to paint trees” book. It assures me that “No drawing skills are required. The outlines of five paintings (plus one bonus picture) are provided to pull out from the centre of the book.”
Oh dear ..someone at Amazon has seen my blog and is offering, perhaps much needed, help.

John Ruskin Tree study 1847

John Ruskin Ferns on a rock 1875


These beautiful studies and more from the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University

I always try to consider my leaves as individuals and today I return to an individual croton leaf from the ubiquitous Curly Croton plant which I had drawn before in January here. They are valued for their beautiful leaves, come in amazing colours and have different degrees of curliness. This is a relatively plain one as some of the others are brilliant reds and oranges but it does have a full twist to the leaf.
I have decided to start the final coloured pencil pieces for the course so that I can move on to watercolour. We have to do 4 images so I am factoring in some disaster time. It has been interesting but I have come to the conclusion I am temperamentally unsuited to using coloured pencils this way!

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Curly Croton 2

Musical Interlude

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Sunday and I am having a day off drawing in order to catch up with some research and to make a post for My Darling Popsy. I have been reading about the Africa my grandfather would have been experiencing in the 1926 and trying to tie up the information about the locations together with the photographs. I realise now he was there at the time of the infamous Happy Valley crowd so the research is interesting. The quality of the 1920’s negatives is in some cases quite amazing and in others very poor. However with the help of Photoshop I am managing to coax images out of most of them. I can’t help but wonder what happened to the people in them, especially the children. Here is a lovely photo of a little girl with, I think, a musical instrument, (a harp?) but with no reference to her in the letters yet..

Leaf of the Day : A Gummy Unfinished Begonia Leaf

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The trials of the natural history artist 2..problems with the weather, materials and mosquitos.
If I am ever tempted to complain about the discomfort and the difficulty of working in a hot climate I always try to think of two great lady pioneers of Botanical Illustration, Margaret Mee and Marianne North who both took their art materials out into the jungle to record rare species, braving disease, violence and sweltering temperatures. Today however, my comparably very trivial problems have been enough to make me want to throw the coloured pencils in the bin, head straight for the airport and and book a ticket to ( I hear ) snowy England.
The humidity and torrential rain have made the paper damp. The high temperatures have wilted my model and made the already quite waxy coloured pencils gummy and soft, so drawing with them has become like applying a candle to a hotplate. My attempts to draw the fine delicate fringe to this little begonia leaf has tried my patience to the very limit. I have given up.
To add to all this I have 11 mosquito bites, 5 of them on my hands.. Why?? Why are there mosquitoes? Why do they bite your fingers when there are nice big accommodatingly smooth and unwrinkled bit to attack. What is the point of the bites itching so badly that you want to tear the flesh from your bones with your teeth? …
However, thankfully, I did get to the library today which was a more soothing experience.

Some early accounts of Florida ..good and bad.
There I found a book about an early intrepid Florida explorer and recorder, Jacques Le Moyne, who in 1562 arrived in Florida with a French expedition and recorded the lives of the Native Americans. The French were driven out of Florida by the Spanish and Le Moyne was one of the few to escape alive. The survivors eventually landed in Britain where Le Moyne remained. I will return to him when I have read more.
But I also came across this early song about Florida. The first on record written in English, it appears in a manuscript in Oxford’s Bodleian Library dated 1584. Had the Anon author, I wonder, whiled away a couple of hours in an ale house with Le Moyne hearing about bizarre and improbable practices from this foreign land, such as smoking dried leaves?.. a notion almost absurd as yesterdays sloth. (Tobacco doesn’t arrive in England until 2 years after this poem , but Le Moyne had already recorded its “medicinal use” in his notes.)

“As I walked toward St Pauls
I met a friend of myne
Who took me by the hand and sayde “come drynk a pynt of wyne,
Wher you shall here
Such news I fere,
As you abrode will compel.
With hy!

Have you not hard of Floryda
A countree far by west?
Where savage pepell planted are,
By nature and be hest
Who in the mold find glysterynge gold
And yt for tryfels sell
With hy!

Ye , all along the water side
Wher yt doth eb and flowe
Are turkeyse found and wher also
Do perles in oysters grow;
And on the land do cedars stand
Whose bewty do excel
With hy!

Wunnot a wallet do well? ”
( a wallet would be useful!)

Almost 200 years later, in 1770, Oliver Goldsmith has a more disconcerting tale to tell prospective settlers who may have felt compelled to try the fair land of La Florida. This is from The Deserted Village.

Through torrid tracts with fainting steps they go,
Where wild Atlantic murmurs to their woe.
Far different there from all that charmed before,
The various terrors of that horrid shore;
Those blazing suns that dart a downward ray
And fiercely shed intolerable day;
Those matted woods where birds forget to sing,
But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling;
Those poisonous fields with rank luxuriance crowned,
Where the dark scorpion gathers death around;
Where at each step the stranger fears to wake
The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake;
Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey,
And savage men more murderous still than they;
While oft in whirls the mad tornado flies,
Mingling the ravaged landscape with the skies.

Today I am definitely with Goldsmith!

Poems from ‘Florida in Poetry’ by Jane Anderson Jones & Maurice J. O’Sullivan
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Begonia

Leaf of the Day: Peacock Iris and an Upsidedown Sloth

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The trials of the natural history artist ..the problem with models.
I chose this pretty iris to draw today as I needed to try a more delicate flower with the coloured pencils. It is dietes bicolor, the peacock iris or Spanish iris.
If I had been doing this drawing for myself and without the botanical painting course in mind I would have put in a dark background to set off the pretty delicate colours and to show the flower as we would normally see it. I was in two minds whether or not to put one in. There are certain conventions or purist schools of thought that would not include any background and there is a distinction between Botanical Art and Botanical illustration. Botanical Illustration is more scientific and is usually for the purpose of identification of a species. Botanical Art allows for more personal interpretation whilst still keeping to the principles of accuracy and detail.
I have spent quite a few hours this week thinking about all this and looking hard at the work of contemporary botanical artists. I do see back grounds now. I may add one to this piece later.
Sadly I wont be able to use the same flower as it has now defiantly curled up its petals into a tight fist and is about to drop off its stem. One day that’s all I had. I am getting very tempted to use photographs. I am going to write about this in another post because its an interesting discussion for artists and for buyers of art.

Identification of species pre camera, of course would rely on seeing the actual object or someone making a drawing from it or sometimes working blind from just a verbal description.
There is an exhibition at the Queens Gallery in Buckingham Palace London “Amazing Rare Things” created in collaboration with David Attenborough. It is an exhibition of Natural History drawings which date from the late fifteenth century to the early eighteenth century, “a period when European knowledge of the world’s flora and fauna was transformed by voyages of discovery to Africa, Asia and the Americas. Through painstaking examination and description, Leonardo da Vinci, the collector Cassiano dal Pozzo, Wenceslaus Hollar, Alexander Marshal, Maria Sibylla Merian and Mark Catesby hoped to comprehend the natural riches of an ever-expanding world. “
DO go to the website ( above) to see the work even if you can’t get to the exhibition..(and there is a book too.)

David Attenborough describes beautifully the dilemma which must have faced the pre-camera artist here in relation to dal Pozzo’s Sloth. Dal Pozzo commissioned artists to draw for him, probably from specimens and skins, so have a kind thought for the artist confronted with the skin of a 3 toed sloth. He did his best and gave us a fiercesome beast with sharp teeth teetering along on its tip toes. How was he to know this strange creature spent its life suspended from a tree branch.. what an absurd notion!

Collection of
Cassiano dal Pozzo
Artist unknown 1626

But it’s lovely, isn’t it .. just for the very fact of its careful and earnest inaccuracy. The exhibition continues until September, its on my list.
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Peacock Iris

Leaf of the Day:Encepalartos Horridus and Yoga

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Today I have spent most of the day out and about..this morning I went down to Leu Gardens early as temperatures are beginning to heat up now and by the afternoon we have spectacular thunderstorms preceded by intense humidity. I am wondering how I will survive the summer?
Arriving early is good because you have the Gardens almost to yourself….almost. I don’t know if it’s just me but my steps seem to be dogged at the moment by yoga or tai chi practitioners who commandeer a bit of public space (usually the very best bit ) with a mat which immediately transforms itself into a private 50 ft radius “DO NOT DISTURB ” zone. She was on the jetty by the lake, cool elegant and composed in her simple leotard. I somehow don’t think she had a burger for breakfast or had arrived on a bike, I was disheveled and sweaty from my dicing-with-death bike ride. The bad person in me wanted to toss her over the rails to the alligators.. The good person was considering a cheery “hello” but she was deeply involved in that pose that looks like a dog being sick so I though better of it and moved along to find the friendlier Cycads.

After reading so much about the Cycads I wanted to go and see them again but a drawback of arriving early to the Gardens is that you may have to trail blaze the paths which are criss crossed with webs, I am not good with spiders. The cone I had taken a photo of 2 weeks ago was bigger and better but the path was guarded by a very large web and it was too early in the day for spider trauma. To be fair I haven’t seen that many here. The ones I did see today were tiny little jeweled little things… but, believe me, I don’t look hard.
However I did find the cycad encepalartos horridus so I have a drawing of a truly horrid leaflet today(actually one I had picked up at Marie Selby last week) and I did meet up with my friend Pedro the gardener, who showed me some more strange and wonderful things in the garden which I will hopefully get round to drawing in the next few days. In the butterfly garden many big beautiful butterflies are languidly flapping from flower to flower and there is a small glass fronted box displaying the most exquisite chrysalises ( chrysalides) of the monarch butterfly. They are like little drops of jade with gold specs… My photo below does not quite capture the colours.

Probably the most spectacular butterflies are the Giant Swallowtails that look like humming birds as they hover amongst the flowers.

photo from the North American Butterfly Association



The full leaf of the ferocious Horridus can be 18-24″ They are long stiff recurving leaves that have many intertwined, needle sharp, leaflets. The spines twist away from the plane of the leaf so it can sink its spines into your flesh however you try to approach it. Its native habitat is on exposed slopes provinces of South Africa. .

Here is my photo from Marie Selby Gardens

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Encephalartos Horridus

Leaf of the Day: Dinosaur Food, Visualising Pre History (& some old tricks with perfume)

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Cycads
Here, as promised from my previous post Cycad Seeds, is just a little information about these amazing, ancient, Permian era plants that are little changed in 250 million years. Standing amongst the huge primeval creatures on a steamy, close day in Leu Gardens, and understanding some of their history, you could be forgiven for mistaking the air’s damp humidity for the the hot breath of a passing Brontosaurus. They are a glimpse into a strange and wonderful past time.

Quiet, stately plants with leaves shooting straight up from the ground or from long thick trunks, the Cycads are gymnosperms and include zamiaceae, encephalartos, and macrozamia. Some are like palms, some more like ferns and some more shrubby. One I saw at Marie Selby Gardens has long fierce thorns and has the enviable name of encephalartos horridus. These below are the cycus revolta, the confusingly named Sago Palm as it is not a palm but it does produce a type of sago.
photo Dave’s Garden again

A native cycad to Florida is the coontie, Zamia pumila. “Coontie” is a Seminole word which approximates to ‘flour root’ and the Seminole people used it despite its poisonous properties.as a very important food source. The stems and roots had to be pounded to a pulp and washed to remove the poisons and then the paste was dried and used as a flour for baking bread. It was known as Florida “Arrow Root” and there was a sizeable industry in Florida producing the starch until about 1925, but overproduction decimated the local plants as is often the case.
I do wonder how, and at what cost people discovered methods of getting rid of the poisonous parts of plants, or that it would be worth the obvious risk in the end. Captain Cook’s pigs, on his Australian expedition, fell foul of the poison and died. His crew only suffered a ‘hearty fit of vomiting and purging’.

Trading Sex for Pollen
Cycads have a novel way of reproducing themselves which may account for their longevity. I am not going to plumb the murky depths of plant sex to any great degree but this is very interesting
Cycads producemale and female cones on different plants. The male cone produces a scent which attracts thrips, little insects, who enter the gaps in the cone and, in doing so, cover themselves in the pollen they have been seeking. The cone then heats up which changes the attractive scent into something that the thrips don’t like at all.. they flee.. only to find that a nearby female cone is producing the weaker scent they like .. Same scent …different strength. Off they go carrying their precious load of fertilizing pollen with them.
Two scientists Irene Terry and husband Robert Roemer have been studying this behavior at the University of Utah.

“They [cycads] are trading food for sex. Pollen is the only thing these thrips eat, so they totally rely on the plants. And the thrips are the only animals that pollinate the plants.”
“These cycads heat up, and associated with that heating is a huge increase in volatile fragrances emitted by the cone” Terry says. “It takes your breath away. It’s a harsh, overwhelming odor like nothing you ever smelled before”
“Think of a guy with too much after shave” Roemer says.

Apparently this is called push-pull pollination.. a nice conversation stopper for that tedious dinner party, especially if you happen to be sitting next to an overscented lothario whose “volatile fragrance” is clashing with your prawn cocktail.

Painting Prehistory

No article about art and prehistory would be complete without mentioning the great and influential painter /illustrator/sculptor Charles R Knight. In the 1890’s and early 19oo’s he brought the prehistoric world to life for us through his careful and meticulously researched paintings.
His love of nature and quest for accuracy took him at the age of 19 to the American Museum of Natural History in New York .

“Visiting the museum on an almost daily basis, he spent hours in the taxidermy department, studying the carcasses of many creatures, familiarizing himself with their musculature and skeletal structure“

He became well known and worked extensively with the leading paleontologists of the day to produce models and paintings showing what the world must have looked like in those extraordinary times.
The Florida link is also here :
“He frequently visited friends and patrons in Palm Beach, Florida. They were delighted to entertain the renowned artist, and Knight used the Floridian foliage, particularly the palm trees, in his large prehistoric paintings. “
(spot the cycads in the painting above)
Here is the lovely tribute site to Knight maintained by his daughter with acknowledgements to his influence on film makers and other artists.. Willis O’Brien, animator of the classic and tragic King Kong and Ray Harryhausen’s epic monsters owed him much.
DO go and have a look at the wonderful work at Charles Knight Gallery.
Like Normal Rockwell you could say he was a commercial artist but don’t they just brighten your day?

Dino Bugs

Synchronicity is still in the air (blame Jung) as yesterday I heard about the new Xray technique (over a hundred years after Knight) that Paul Tafforeau in France has been using to reveal insects from within ancient pieces of opaque rock. The images are quite magical. Not only does this reveal their presence and detail but the information obtained from the rotating scan can then be used to create an exquisite 3D specimen. DO go and watch the short video from the BBC site here Secret Dino Bugs Revealed .
How very excited Knight would surely have been if he could have seen this.

My drawing today is a sketch of the small Cycad about 4ft ( now I know what it is! ) which grows just across the car park at the apartment. I can see it from the top of our steps. On the north side of the trunk a little colony of Resurrection Fern is growing.. and that’s another curious plant for another post.
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Killarney Bay Cycad

Leaf of the Day: The Tree of Enlightenment, a BoTree Leaf

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It is the first of April and an auspicious day for some enlightenment I think.
As well as the course last week, I managed to get to the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota. It’s a small, pretty botanical garden, extended from the once private house of the Selby’s, sitting on the beautiful sweeping Sarasota Bay. It has a particularly nice orchid house, very good labelling and enthusiastic guides to help you. I have added to my Florida snake sightings too and have now seen the huge glowing Yellow Rat Snake which was draped over a large tree branch taking some sun. It was much brighter than the photograph here.

Rat Snake image Encarta

I could only stay for an hour so I took a few photographs but will definitely want to return. I did find the beautiful Bo tree which was at the far end of the gardens. There were plenty of fallen leaves and I felt I should gather one or two in the hopes of some much needed enlightenment rubbing off on me.
Another member of the energetic fig family, the ficus religiosa is the tree under which the Buddha was sitting when he gained enlightenment.

It’s a very lovely tree and the leaves have a beautiful tapering point. (They are well known to craft people as these are the skeleton leaves that you find in hobby stores.) Bo trees are always planted near temples and they are a symbol of good luck, peace, happiness and of course enlightenment. This particular tree was blown down in tropical storm Gabrielle which hit the Gulf coast in 2001. A plaque describes how their much loved Bo was carefully and lovingly coaxed upright with the help of a fifty foot crane, replanted and revitalised. Two quotes from the Buddha on the plaque are not bad maxims for life.

“Your work is to discover your world and then, with all your heart, give yourself to it”

“I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act but I believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act”

I also didn’t have time to see the exhibition of Boruca Indian Masks from Costa Rica .. so I really have to get back there before the end of April. I had seen these intricately caved masks in a fabulous Carnival exhibition in San Jose’s Museum when I was in Costa Rica two years ago now. The masks are wonderful…here is an image from a previous exhibition. I will write more when I can get back to Sarasota.

My modest little watercolour today is just to celebrate April.. the month in England that leads up to the prettiest garden month in the year.
So a purple ( the colour of wisdom and knowledge) Bo leaf with a bit of colour theory thrown in for good measure.
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The Bo Leaf

Leaf of the Day: Cycad Seeds

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Todays drawing is a coloured pencil version of yesterdays seeds. To just draw 2 seeds doesn’t really do these magnificent ancient plants justice but to tackle a full leaf or cone requires much more time.
I am always fascinated by the design and mechanics of seed pods. The ways that seeds develop and are then dispersed shows natural design at its most ingenious. Anyone who has studied design in any discipline sees structures in nature that are repeated by engineers and architects.
The cycads produce seed cones which have a similar visual design to pine cones and pineapples with arcs and spiral patterns.

Here are cones from Marie Selby Gardens and Leu Gardens.









this photo and more from Dave’s Garden

These patterns are formed by the way the individual scales are arranged. The spirals follow patterns depending on the size of the cones There may be 3 spirals running to the left and 5 spirals moving oppositely, or vice versa. In larger ones, a combination of 5 and 8 spirals, or 8 and 13 spirals and giant cones may have a combination of 13 and 21.

The sharp knives in the box will have realised that these numbers are the Fibonacci sequence…. but that is a whole other post or two. Here it is demonstrated with a strawberry.. same principal.


My two seeds here were both attached to one cone scale by their tips and hang either side of a central “stem”. ..one since came away.

Its shape reminded me of the old fairground ride the Paratrooper and, come to think of it, fairground ride design in general must owe something to the design of seed pods.
The principals are similar although it is preferable that the occupants of these various pods, capsules and containers, whilst being twisted and twirled, are not literally scattered to the winds…

Link for the spiral and other great food/design stuff is at http://www.foodfordesign.blogspot.com/
For more photos and some fairground nostalgia go to the University of Sheffield’s wonderful National Fairground Archive
www.nfa.dept.shef.ac.uk/inldex.htm

I am writing a separate post on the wonderful prehistoric cycads.. they are fascinating both in their antiquity and their bizarre pollination methods which involve some over-heated insects and perfumes good and bad…coming next.
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Cycad Seeds